


Photographs

by anonniemoose



Series: Beetlejuice Oneshots [1]
Category: Beetlejuice (1988), Beetlejuice (TV 1989), Beetlejuice - All Media Types, Beetlejuice - Perfect/Brown & King
Genre: Beetlejuice Needs a Hug, Established Relationship, F/M, Historical Inaccuracy, Memories, Reader dies, Yellow Fever, beetlejuice is sad
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-05
Updated: 2019-12-05
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:47:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21676243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonniemoose/pseuds/anonniemoose
Summary: Lydia finds a box at Beetlejuice’s house, not realising that what it contains is an emotional subject for her friend. He goes through each item in the box and explains the history of the person the images are centered around.
Relationships: Beetlejuice & Lydia Deetz, Beetlejuice (Beetlejuice)/Reader
Series: Beetlejuice Oneshots [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1562617
Comments: 5
Kudos: 109





	Photographs

**Author's Note:**

> So, I’ve fallen in love with a song that Alex Brightman sings from the 35mm musical called Cut You A Piece and it gives me tears every time I hear it so here. Have a fic loosely based on it.
> 
> Basically, the Beetlejuice I’m using is Musical!Juice but stuff like Lydia visiting his house in the Netherworld is more from the cartoon. You were alive in the 1850s. There are mentions of yellow fever and death in this fic. It’s pretty sad, if people want a happy ending hmu and bc I have ideas. I also based the hair colours off dreammbc’s mood ring hair headcanons found [here](https://dreammcb.tumblr.com/post/188634376824/beej-hair-headcanons). Takes place after the musical, Beej disappeared for about a year before returning to hang out with his best friends and everyone in the Deetz house are fine with him sue me I want a happy family ending. Female reader, soz all. Enjoy! My tumblr is the-ineffable-prince-of-hells if you wanna swing by to have a chat!

Beetlejuice hadn’t thought of you in the better part of sixty years. Possibly longer. It was too hard to think about you and what happened. He didn’t like crying or feeling broken, but after everything that happened? He just broke down whenever he thought of you.

So, when Lydia brought up the box in the living room that remained firmly shut, the sudden onset of emotions that attacked him was enough for Lydia to decide to get out.

He was never good with emotions.

It took a couple of days before he calmed down, his hair slowly having blue and yellow slowly streaking into it compared to the pitch black it had been since Lydia brought up the box. It took another day for him to sheepishly return to the Deetz’s to apologise, box in hand.

He apologised for scaring her (he didn’t) and that he just needed his space (she knows) but if she really wanted to know what was in the box, he could show her now.

The curious teen tentatively took the box from him and opened it up. Inside were a few, old looking photos of a woman dressed in what appears to be just an everyday dress from the mid 1800’s and a very clean looking Beetlejuice dressed in similarly aged attire. Both of you were laughing and smiling, holding onto each other, clearly very much in love. Beneath all five of the photos was what clearly used to be a pressed rose, although it looked a little beyond dead at this point, and two silver rings, one larger than the other. Lydia carefully held each object as Beetlejuice looks down at them next to her, clearly in another world as he just watches her go over every single item. “Who was she?” She finally asks, pointing to the woman in the picture.

“Y/N.” He breaths out, a small smile appearing on his lips as he takes the photo, the last one the two of you took together before-. “She was my fiancé.” He explains softly as he thumbs over your laughing face at whatever bad joke, he had told you right before the photo was taken. “Well, nearly.” Lydia looks over at the photos again, it’s clear in every single one Beetlejuice is absolutely smitten. She turns over the top photo in the pile on her lap, in green ink and swirled writing she makes out the caption. ‘June 6th, 1852. Beetlejuice and Y/N, New York. Pretty sure the photographer was over us by the end.’

“How did you meet?” She doesn’t look up from the pile in her lap, continuing to turn over each photo to reach the written message on the back. She didn’t notice the fond smile and his mood ring hair slowly turning to a pastel green.

“Her friends summoned me as a joke.” He starts. “19th century was filled with people who wanted to communicate with the dead, her friends didn’t think that anything would happen but then I showed up and they all booked it. She thought I was hysterical so she kept me around. About a year later, she asked me to court her and so we started dating.” He starts to fidget and fiddle, putting the photo back in the box so he doesn’t ruin it with the anxiety that’s running through his body. The last thing he wants to do is crinkle the photos or, God/Satan forbid, rip it. “We dated for about three years, those photos were for our first anniversary. She didn’t believe in the whole getting married thing, we were already living together and that was enough for her. Bit unconventional for the time, but that was my Y/N.” His smile widens slightly when the happy memories start to wash over him. “Was always there if I needed help scaring someone, always there to bounce ideas. Couldn’t stand the fact that I was filthy all the time, so I took to bathing for her which was a big deal for both of us. She had a higher standard of cleanliness than most people back then. Couldn’t dance to save herself though. Not wearing those dresses, she kept tripping over the skirts.”

Lydia listens to every word, letting Beetlejuice more or less spill his heart out. Neither of them are into heart-to-hearts, but its pretty evident that this time around, its what her friend needs. She listens as he lists off every single thing he loved about her and the things that frustrated him about her, every tiny detail she loved about life and the things she hated, what she loved about him and what caused her to want to beat him with a stick. It was like all of a sudden, he could remember every detail that he had thought he had forgotten, and if he didn’t voice them, they’d be gone. By the end of it, his hair was streaked with faint blue with his pastel green, voice was wobbly, and eyes wear close to shedding tears. Lydia knew that he had to get it out of his system and, even though it made her uncomfortable, she wanted to give him permission to just let it out.

“What happened to her?” Her voice is gentle and encouraging as he clears his throat, not really wanting to tell her how your relationship ended, but needing to nonetheless.

“She died.” He quietly admits. “Yellow fever, there was an outbreak around 1853, 1855. She was one of the last ones to die.” He swallowed before continuing. “I thought something was wrong, but she insisted it was just a cold. She was so hot, couldn’t even stand to hear me walk across the floor to get her something to drink. Couldn’t eat she was so tired, but she was in so much pain she couldn’t sleep. So, she just cried and held on to me to keep her cool.” Beetlejuice closed his eyes, already seeing her face resurfacing in his mind. “It was after three days of pain she started to puke her guts up. Three days after that, she was vomiting blood. Two days after that, she started going yellow. She kept saying that she didn’t want to go to hospital but when she started to go yellow in her eyes and her skin looked like she had been rolling around in the yellow dye vat at her work, I just stood up and carried her there myself.” He swallows. “I should have taken her there sooner, by the time we got her there she was already too close to death. I stayed with her in that hospital, helped her drink whatever little water I could and let her sleep with me keeping her cool. She just continued to go yellow. There was so much blood, Lyds, I never thought a breather could produce so much.” He needs to breath, the smell of the hospital refilling his nose was getting to be too much for him. “Eventually, she just slept. She slept for another week before she died in my arms. And that was the end of that.” He retakes the photo from before and flips it over, in his messy and almost illegible handwriting he reread the words he’d written there over a hundred years ago in the same green ink. ‘Marry me?’ “I should have taken her to the hospital sooner, but I thought she’d know best. She was still a breather, I hadn’t been alive for centuries by that point, I thought perhaps I was overreacting because I was excited. I found out about the clause, if you marry a breather you become one too. I was going to propose to her and explain that we could have an actual relationship together and die together, be a bit more normal. I never got that chance.” In anger, he throws the photo back down as he slams back onto Lydia’s bed. It’s only now that she realises his hair is streaked in almost every colour of the rainbow as conflicting emotions hit him from left, right and centre. She gives him a minute before slowly packing everything away.

“Did you look for her?” She hears him nod against the mattress, his eyes still pressed firmly shut as he tries his best to cry silently.

“Spent nearly a hundred years looking through the Netherworld tryna find her. Spent a bit of time looking up here too. No luck. She’s gone, babes. You will never find what you’re looking for in the Nether, so there’s no point in looking.” He cracks open an eye to look at the box now sitting between him and the goth teen and sighs. “I try not to think of her, it hurts too much. But wherever I go, she comes too.”

Lydia hums. She gets it, to a degree. It hurts every single time she thinks of her mother, how sick she got and how quick she had died. But she still needed to think of her, she’d rather face the pain than forget her mother. And she also knows what it feels like when wherever you go, you feel like you’re carrying that person with you. “Perhaps it’s what you need? It hurts but you still have all your good memories.” He hums, not really agreeing or disagreeing. “It sounds like you cut her a piece of you, and she cut you a piece of her. You carry her now and I think she carries you too, Beej.”

Beetlejuice doesn’t make a sound, but he did hear her. It takes a while for his emotions to slowly simmer down to background noise and once it does, he simply sits up, grabs the box and shuts it away, leaving everything as it was before he opened it. Perhaps one day, he will be able to open the box without hurting and perhaps, one day, he will run into you again. Perhaps it’ll work out for him in the long run. But for now, he’d rather not think about it.

“Let’s go scare your dad kid, I’ve been letting him relax for too long now.” The demon offers as a distraction. Lydia, under normal circumstances, wouldn’t let him get away that easy. But she’s willing to let this one slide as the two of them leave the room to go plot a way to give Charles the fright of his life, leaving the box on the bed unattended, unseen, as it opens, and a sixth photograph appears on top of the pile. Of a very sickly-looking woman sleeping in the arms of a very stressed demon sleeping in a hospital bed surrounded by other sick people. On the back, the words simply say ‘Wherever you go, I’ll go too. I lost my life when I lost you.’ You can wait for him to be ready to find you again, however long it takes.


End file.
